Hatrack River - The Official Web Site of Orson Scott Card
	Print   |   Back

The real surprise in Lefkowitz's book is not that the Afrocentric charge that "the white Greeks stole all their brilliant achievements from the black Egyptians" (count the falsehoods in that statement), but rather that this outrageously false, divisive, and patronizing-to-blacks doctrine actually has an intellectual history. That is, those who tell it, while they have certainly added their own layers of falsehood onto it, did not invent it out of whole cloth, and some of the sources are ancient indeed.

Beginning with Greek and Egyptian writers in the early centuries A.D. (and even some B.C.), the saga of the myth of Egyptian sources of Greek culture is a long and sometimes painful one. At first it was simply an antiquarian fad among Greeks and a wistful desire among Egyptians to claim more importance in a world that had passed them by that led Greeks and Egyptians to feed this myth to each other.

But when this pseudo-historical myth was picked up by European scholars in the 1700s, it began to take a very different spin. First, it became part of the basis of Freemasonry, which is what carried the story into the black community, which first began emphasizing the racial aspects, which would have meant nothing to the Greeks or Egyptians themselves. Second, it became one of the roots of a romanticized European view of Egypt, which was part of the impetus behind the Egyptology fad of the 1800s — eventually giving rise to the real science of Egyptology, after the Rosetta Stone and later language work allowed us to read hieroglyphics, which turned out to be syllabic rather than ideographic.

Unfortunately, the entire myth of Egyptian roots of Greek thought depends on a view of Egyptian culture which is completely, utterly false. In fact, it is a projection of Greek culture onto ancient Egypt by the Greek writers who first claimed an Egyptian origin for some of their ancestors' ideas and achievements. The actual evidence in Egypt shows that these stories were never true, and that they grew and survived to meet the needs of Greek and, later, European romantics. So what the Afrocentrists are teaching is, ironically, a completely European (and thus white) distortion of Egyptian culture.

What's wrong with Afrocentrism, in Lefkowitz's view? It damages the entire university system, as real historians allow fear of being called racist to keep them silent in the face of bad history. It hurts black students and African-Americans in general because instead of teaching them real African history (including Egyptian history), in which they could take proper pride, it teaches them a false Egyptian history which will lead only to disillusionment and shame when one-time believers realize how they have been deceived. It also steals from the Greek people their just pride in the achievements of their ancestors. And it is invariably taught in such inflammatory terms that these lies may well be laying the groundwork for bitter racial conflict in the future.

The irony is that true African history is being killed, hidden, or stolen — but the crime is being committed by the Afrocentrists, and they charge those who would like to defend the truth with being racists instead of being honest historians.

Still, having read Not Out of Africa, I was left feeling sadness for the Afrocentrists rather than the contempt I had felt before — for they are as much deceived themselves as they are deceivers. Nevertheless, they remain guilty of the intellectual sin they continue to commit: stifling honest inquiry and personally attacking those who ask honest questions. It is time for the black community itself to say, "Show us the evidence, or shut up." For just because a story makes a community feel good doesn't mean the story is good — and it certainly doesn't make it more likely to be true, for the truth always causes at least a little pain. It simply causes less pain, in the long run, than lies.

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/reviews96/lefkowitz.shtml